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The Free Software Distribution Model

Someone on KernelTrap claimed that Windows has a superior distribution
model for third party software.

This is a faulty claim, on several levels:

There is no real standard for application distribution on Windows,
save from a few common idioms and libraries like InstallShield.

On GNU/Linux, the distribution model tends to be entirely
different. Users generally get all their software, in the entire
stack all the way from the kernel to the desktop applications, from
a single distributor. Thus, there is a common infrastructure for
dependency management, filesystem structure, and configuration file
management. Not only does this normalized interface for software
management allow for a cleaner user experience in managing and
updating their software, but the distributor can perform integration
testing. The fact that all this code is Free Software is what
enables this distribution model.

1

apt-get install vlc

Easy!

I suspect that the issues they had (complaining that VLC was difficult
to install, etc.) probably arose from them attempting to use stuff
that simply wasn’t ready yet at the time. If one elects to be on the
bleeding edge, expect a bit of pain.